Untying Life’s Knotted Shoestrings

About a year ago, I was feel­ing over­whelmed with work and night classes. No mat­ter how hard I tried, the tasks of life seemed to stack up and call me. I felt like I would miss (and did!) impor­tant dead­lines. Because of all of the dif­fer­ent things on my plate, I no longer felt like I could count on myself to meet my responsibilities–much less be reli­able for those who were count­ing on me. I had to find some way to help man­age the chaos of life and reduce my stress.

Doing Things

With so many things vying for my atten­tion, there were times when my sys­tem would go into over­load and I would just sit there like a giraffe at a ping pong tour­na­ment, cran­ing my neck at this task and that, with­out get­ting any­thing done. I decided that I needed some advice. Based on a rec­om­men­da­tion I saw on the web (I don’t remem­ber where), I decided to read “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” by David Allen. The book gave me some ideas on how to orga­nize things to reduce stress and clut­ter. The biggest trea­sure I found in the book was instruc­tions for set­ting up a revolv­ing file that requires lit­tle main­te­nance to auto­mat­i­cally put impor­tant items on my daily agenda. I set up two of these files: one at work, one at home.

Leashing the Mail Mann

Taking a tip from the book, the next big dis­trac­tion I needed to remove was email. In pre­vi­ous jobs, email had been a cen­tral com­mu­ni­ca­tion hub. I had made a habit of stop­ping every­thing when email arrived. In my new career, I value large blocks of unin­ter­rupted time. My obses­sion with email worked against this. To add to the stress, my email orga­ni­za­tion sys­tem was fail­ing. I kept any­thing and every­thing. In the­ory, this is great, but the real­ity resem­bles that spare room in your house with all of the boxes. Yes, every­thing is in there, but get­ting the door open and then find­ing some­thing is an all day task.
I looked around for some great ways to tame my inbox. I found Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero. This site con­tains a series of blog entries designed to teach you how to man­age email in a pro­duc­tive way. After imple­ment­ing most of the tech­niques, I now main­tain a well orga­nized fil­ing sys­tem. My email fold­ers con­tain only what I need, and my Inbox never con­tains more than a few unread messages.

What Is Stress?

After remov­ing these two large stress pro­duc­ers, life became much sim­pler. I no longer have to remem­ber as much as before (I hate remem­ber­ing short-term things!) because the tech­niques I use to orga­nize things are tried and true. What about you? What are some ways you cope with life’s chaos?

Tagged as: email, inbox, life, organization